She writes, "It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals' embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad" (3). Instead, they are brushed aside in favor of Du Mez's thesis. However, these reasons are quickly dismissed as Du Mez sees Donald Trump as an almost inevitable symptom of evangelicalism rather than an outlier.īecause this statement is in the introduction, the reader expects that the book will engage with these different reasons that many similarly qualified people gave to explain the evangelical support of Donald Trump, but these alternative claims are never dealt with. As one who did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020, I often used these reasons to explain why some of my best friends voted for a candidate that many of my other best friends could not tolerate. By confusing 'evangelicals-in-name-only' with good, church-attending, Bible-believing Christians, sloppy pollsters were giving evangelicalism a bad rap" (3). Evangelicals were thinking in purely transactional terms, as Trump himself is often said to do, voting for Trump because he promised to deliver Supreme Court appointments that would protect the unborn and secure their own 'religious liberty.' Or maybe the polls were misleading. Evangelicals were holding their noses, choosing the lesser of two evils-and Hillary Clinton was the greatest evil.
She goes on to write, without citation, "Pundits scrambled to explain. Although Joel Wentz argues in his YouTube review that Du Mez is not seeking to make a causal argument, these early passages in the introduction do seem to suggest that she wants to know why white evangelicals were so likely to vote for Donald Trump. We, therefore, have a book with an identity crisis that has some valid critiques of the evangelical church, but I fear those critiques are going to get lost because of many unjustified mischaracterizations that will cause readers to question its credibility.ĭu Mez's central thesis hinges on the widely reported 81 percent of white evangelical supporters supporting Donald Trump in the 2016 election (2). However, in terms of tone, it clearly has surrendered any trappings of objectivity and draws much closer to Butler's screed.
Did she intend to write a work of academic history, or did she intend to write cultural commentary? One might look at this heavily cited (Jamie Carlson at Mere Orthodoxy does make a fair point that despite all the citations, direct citations are lacking in some places in favor of references to other secondary sources) and heavily researched book and assume it is intended to be academic in nature.
I struggled to place my finger on Du Mez's actual purpose, which impacted how I engaged with her work. Hills offer similar praise, saying, " Jesus and John Wayne is an excellent resource to help make sense of the racial, cultural, and religious ideological fronts that currently shape evangelical Christianity and political alignments." In a book review published in the academic journal Church History, Jon Butler wrote, "But whether screed or academic tome, Du Mez's portrait of American evangelicalism makes Jesus and John Wayne not only one of the most important books on religion and the 2016 elections but one of the most important books on post-1945 American evangelicalism published in the past four decades."Īlthough I had not read Butler's review until I completed the book, I now realize that he identifies the key struggle I felt as I read it, even as he praises it. The Englewood Review of Books named Du Mez's work its 2020 Book of the Year, writing, " Jesus and John Wayne is an absolute must-read, a stunning work, and one that deserves serious attention and further conversation." Karen Swallow Prior was quoted in the Washington Post as saying, "Among my own group of friends and peers, this is the book that they have been talking about more than any other in recent years … I can't think of the last one that people talked about this much." On Reading Religion, Darrius D.
Kristen Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin College, is proving to be one of the most talked-about pieces of Christian commentary in recent history. This New York Times bestseller, written by Dr. To say that Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted Their Faith and Fractured a Nation hit a nerve is an understatement.
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